Wednesday October 11, 2017, 8:18 am
From the article:
My recent article “22 Ways To Delay The Electric Car Revolution” was hugely popular, but readers offered a lot more ideas and wanted me to take the list to 50, so here we are.

To keep everything in one place, I’ve copy & pasted the original article here and then expanded it. Enjoy!

Let’s say that, for some reason, you really don’t want humans to drive in cleaner, more enjoyable, more exciting, safer, better electric cars. How do you go about slowing down the transition? Below are prescriptions for four different groups (automakers, the media, investors, and politicians) that could “pitch in and do their part” to delay the transition.

"Whatever you do, don’t admit that electric cars can crush gasoline cars off the line.
Certainly, do not produce a fully electric car that puts your quickest gasoline cars to shame.
When the media asks you about electric cars, say that you support their development and are working on them, but also claim that they are too expensive, don’t have enough range, and customers don’t want them. (Ignore the fact that this is all basically because of how you’ve approached electric cars and the products you’ve created.)
When advertising, target a tiny niche group of hippies and don’t focus on the better drive quality, acceleration, smooth ride, or greater convenience (home charging) of your electric cars.
Very critically, don’t work hard to scale up battery production, and only make token baby steps (as a sign of “effort”) to roll out or help roll out fast charging.
For that matter, act like 50 kW DC charging is “fast charging” and don’t touch anything over 100 kW for as long as possible.
Give your electric cars 3.3 kW Level 2 max charging, rather than much more useful 10 kW or 20 kW Level 2 max charging.

If forced to produce more electric cars in certain markets, make most of them plug-in hybrids with small batteries that take away from key benefits of EVs (like smooth acceleration, not having to go to a gas station, etc.)

Really push the idea that the technology and consumers are not ready for fully electric cars, and that plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) will be important transition vehicles for decades to come.
If forced to sell electric cars in popular car markets, tell customers not to buy them (but try not to admit that electric cars would destroy the competitive advantages and finances of your business, and that’s why you don’t want people to buy the better product).

When you build your PHEVs, be sure to make the engines big and the motors small — this will help to make them more expensive than necessary while hiding the cost and performance benefits of EVs.
Additionally, rather than designing EVs or PHEVs from scratch, just turn a gasoline model into an EV/PHEV model. This will be more complicated and make the model less appealing than building from scratch.

When turning gas models into EV/PHEV models, make sure to cut out enough storage space that the car becomes impractical for most buyers.
Do not produce EVs in the SUV, CUV, or pickup truck classes. Those categories are too popular and the operational cost benefits in those classes would be too appealing to buyers. Plus, if EVs/PHEVs compete in just a couple of categories (like the compact and subcompact classes), they will take less business from your gasoline cars.
By the way, if you do have an attractive electric model, especially in a class without EVs, delay its introduction a few times, or even several times. Actually, just align your actual production plans with the concept “tomorrow never comes,” while letting consumers believe that tomorrow actually means the day after today.

Pretend to be the biggest electric car fan and perhaps even the biggest electric car expert but sad that the technology just isn’t ready for consumers.

If a fully electric car producer comes along with a competitive product, act like the company is a niche player that you don’t pay any attention to and criticize any downside (no matter how small) of its cars.

When a fully electric car company like this is close to producing a mass-market car that will eat the lunch of your more expensive, performance-oriented models, claim that it is only vaporware (even if hundreds of people have ridden in a prototype and had their minds blown).
In tandem with #8, claim that it is utterly impossible to make a profit on a competitive, long-range, attractive electric car if you are selling it for $35,000. Don’t make it sound like you don’t have a clue how to do this, or are lying through your teeth — be sure to make it seem as though this is completely impossible.
If this new carmaker reveals an extremely attractive mass-market EV model for next year, and gets ~400,000 pre-orders for the car within a few months, announce that you will produce a similarly great (or greater) EV. Don’t give a date, or maybe say in 2020 or so. Do not give an expected price.

Please, act like hydrogen fuel cell cars are the future, not total crap. Explain that you are not doing much with battery-electric cars because you believe in fairy dust fuel cells.

Even go so far as to waste money producing hydrogen fuel cell cars instead of battery-electric cars. Any delay tactic is a good tactic, even if it means wasting money — hey, that’s an even more convincing approach!"